Trying to Fit the Laws of Morality into our Scientific Understanding

Very specific and precise laws such as the cosmological constant and the Fibonacci sequence have been discovered and proven which govern science, math and biology within our universe.

All scientists would agree that there is an order and a pattern to our universe.
So what about a moral code? What are it’s laws? Where can we find them?

It seems that they are written inside the DNA of all of us along with an inherent guilt for violating them.

How is it then, that the moral laws are the only laws in our universe that can be violated?

Does it seem like an obvious conclusion to anyone else that there was a grand designer of this very ordered universe?

If so, would this designer have allowed this violation of the moral code to happen for some reason?

But why? If only there was a message from this omnipotent Designer - explaining how these violations happen and if there is a solution to all the destruction and guilt from these moral violations which are universally felt throughout the human race.

You’re abusing the term “law” when you say that “they’re the only laws that can be violated”.

From the underlying genetically mediated tendency to think about things a certain way - for instance morally- to the final behaviour to which we assign the terms moral, immoral or amoral, there’s an enormous number of intervening variables which are causally related to the final outcome.

We don’t know what they are, we don’t know how they effect people so at least for this reason, although probably for a number of other deeper reasons, we can’t predict people’s behaviour.

So there’s no “law” where “law” means “we can predict this human’s behaviour the way we can predict the course of falling bodies”.

But that’s not the same as saying there is no scientific law underlying human morality at all. There are laws which determine the how genetics and environment interact to produce human behaviour, just like there are laws determining everything else, we just don’t know enough yet to model it completely. And maybe we never will.

So what good is it? The utility of understanding that genetics is the source of morality is the same utility that all scientific knowledge has - before you can hope to influence something, you have to understand how it does, in fact, work to the greatest degree you can manage. The more you know, the more influence over it you may be able to achieve. At the very least, you’re not constantly attempting to do impossible things in horribly inefficient ways because you’re laboring under a false set of premises- like the devil is in someone and that’s why they’re acting like that.

If you don’t have a correct theory, one that stands up to examination and criticism by the scientific method, then you’re just being guided by folk wisdom or superstition.

People are essentially whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few million years. That’s not a glamorous starting point but if you cant’ face reality because you find it distasteful or disappointing then you can’t ever change anything you don’t like about humans either, like their bellicosity or their self-destructive, short-sighted greediness. You can’t change it because you refuse to accept what science is telling you about what it is you want to see changed. It’s like firing a gun and instead of aiming using Newton’s laws as your underlying theory, you pray to God and reflect on the righteousness of your side and the wickedness of the people you’re shooting at. Guess which side wins the war.

We evolved to survive in an general environment and social arrangements in which the possibility of doing everyone in via global warming and nuclear weapons didn’t exist. In other words, the genes we still carry from that time did not evolve to help us survive the world we now inhabit. Any creature that fits that description has a serious problem.

We may be a failed experiment. We may extinguish ourselves. That is a possibility you have to face. If we do it’s because we understood external nature better than we understood the part of nature we call ourselves. If human extinction conflicts with your value system, then you need to understand why people act the way they do so you can change it.

A couple of quotes from Einstein leap to mind here.

One is “The bomb has changed everything for mankind except his thinking”